For Avicii, An EDM Revolution -- And Personal Evolution -- Cut Short

Avicii, the Swedish DJ and producer who was found dead today at age 28, had already helped define the sound known as Electronic Dance Music when he released his debut album in 2013. And even back then, he was striving to redefine the genre.

Fresh off the success of "Levels," the 2011 smash that became his first song to chart in the U.S. and helped establish EDM's foothold in the country, Avicii wasn't content with making more of the same thumpy, synthy hits upon which he was starting to build his career. In early 2013, he premiered "Wake Me Up" — the bluegrass-, country-, soul- and rock-infused lead track of his album True, released later that year, with its iconic Aloe Blacc chorus — in front of a puzzled crowd at the EDM festival Ultra in Miami.

“It really shook people around and shocked them and grabbed people’s attention," he told me at the time. "I really wanted to play around with the elements of country that are really amazing. ... It’s a way to advance the [EDM] genre so it doesn’t get stuck. Which I think it does, to an extent.”

That quote encapsulates what Avicii spent his career trying to do — and what the tragic end of his all-too-brief life means for EDM. He had an almost Steve Jobs-esque feel for what consumers wanted, even before they knew they wanted it, a trait perhaps best illustrated by the rollout of "Wake Me Up." Despite the initial confusion at its debut at Ultra, the track went on to move 1.7 million units in its first two months, and it topped the charts in more than 20 countries.

Avicii earned $7 million in 2012, making the inaugural Forbes ranking of the world's highest-paid DJs. After "Wake Me Up," the cash came in even greater chunks as he started collecting six-figure nightly checks on the road — $20 million in 2013, $28 million in 2014, $19 million in 2015 — helping him earn a spot on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list.

Today, five years after its release, the music video for "Wake Me Up" has clocked 1.5 billion streams, placing it among the top 40 of all-time on YouTube.

In order to understand Avicii's impact on electronic music, it's important to know the history of EDM, which was never really a genre outside the U.S. and still isn't considered one by many purists — not to mention some superstar DJs who profit from it.

“In Europe, we never had the expression ‘EDM,’” Dutch DJ Tiësto once explained to me. “Everyone was in their own little scene: the house heads, the trance heads, the club heads. … In America when you play, you can play all that stuff together. And there’s a lot of people who like to listen to everything and not just one style.”

Avicii knew that as well as anybody. ("I don’t see EDM anywhere else than in America," he told me in our 2013 interview. "It’s a very American term.") If anything, EDM is a recently coined term for a poppy subgenre of what could broadly be called electronic music, which itself dates back to European pioneers like Kraftwerk and American forefathers like Frankie Knuckles in the 1970s and 1980s.

Yet in recent years, particularly amid the boom in electronic music festivals throughout the U.S. and DJ residencies in Las Vegas clubs,EDM has become a catch-all term that many have used — incorrectly — to describe anything on the electronic spectrum. It has also become a buzzword synonymous with the negative sides of rave culture, particularly in relation to substance use, something Avicii struggled with at various points in his career, landing him in the hospital twice before his retirement from touring at age 26.

“To me, it was something I had to do for my health,” he said in 2016. “The scene was not for me. It was not the shows and not the music. It was always the other stuff surrounding it that never came naturally to me. All the other parts of being an artist. I'm more of an introverted person in general. It was always very hard for me. I took on board too much negative energy.”

It seemed that he was living out the lessons of "Wake Me Up" in real time ("So wake me up when it's all over, when I'm wiser and I'm older / All this time I was finding myself, and I didn't know I was lost") — and that he'd found himself before it was too late. His 2017 EP, Avīci (01), topped the charts in his native Sweden and spawned singles "Lonely Together" and "Without You," both of which went gold and/or platinum in several countries.

And as Avicii evolved, so did EDM, with elements of the subgenre being gobbled up by mainstream pop music. In the wake of his 2014 production work on Coldplay's "Sky Full of Stars," for example, such collaborations have become more commonplace. Take the Chainsmokers' 2017 album, Memories...Do Not Open, which featured appearances by Coldplay, Jhene Aiko and Florida Georgia Line.

One of the saddest parts of Avicii's death is that we won't get to see where he was going, and where he was taking EDM, or perhaps other genres. He certainly had lofty aspirations, given his nature as an optimist — about music, about people, about life. Among the last things he said to me in our 2013 interview: “There’s not really any limits whatsoever to what you can do."